The Fly

I remembered The Fly as a low-budget, early-1950s creature-feature. I was wrong on all counts.

Visually, I’d lumped it in with Them! and The Thing from Another World, early 1950s, black-and-white, 1.33:1 monster movies. But The Fly came later, at the end of the decade, and features lush color photography in Cinemascope.

I also remembered it as a Vincent Price picture about a mad scientist who turns into a monster. Except Price isn’t the mad scientist, or even the star. He’s a third-billed audience surrogate. And the scientist, played by David Hedison, isn’t mad and doesn’t turn into a monster per se, but suffers a horrific accident.

The film opens with Hedison’s wife, played by Patricia Owens, having crushed Hedison via an industrial press. Much of the film unfolds in flashback, with Owens relating to Price (who plays Hedison’s brother) how she came into the situation.

Hedison had discovered the ability to teleport matter. The script does an admirable job bridging the gap between science and fiction, with Hedison explaining via an apt analogy for 1950s audiences: “Take television. What happens? A stream of electrons—sound and picture impulses—are transmitted through the air. The TV camera is the disintegrator. Your set unscrambles or integrates the electrons back into pictures and sound.”

When Owens replies that it’s impossible, Hedison scoffs. “Fifty years ago, if my father were told he could sit in Montreal and watch a World Series in New York as it happened, he’d say it was impossible.”

Hedison has grand aspirations for solving world hunger with his invention. “There’ll never be famine. Surpluses can be sent instantaneously at almost no cost, anywhere. Humanity need never want or fear again.”

This sets Hedison up as a sympathetic character, and he shines as an eccentric inventor, so obsessed by his work he’s scratching down equations on the program during a ballet performance, but stops with a smile when Owens touches his shoulder and shakes her head.

But from the start, slight problems emerge with his invention. When he shows his discovery to Owens by teleporting a plate, the “Made in Japan” text stamped on the back emerges reversed after teleportation. Hedison sets to work resolving the problem and is soon teleporting whole newspapers with nary a letter out of place. But in his hurry to progress further, he teleports the family cat—which never reappears. Instead, in a haunting scene, we hear its disembodied meows.

But tragedy strikes when Hedison attempts to teleport himself and overlooks a housefly within the chamber. The reveal proves masterful, with Hedison’s head first covered with a dark cloth to hide his hideous visage as he hammers out notes to Owens via a typewriter. When the cloth drops, Owens lets out a shriek that almost compensates for the 1950s-era special effects.

No worries, because Hedison isn’t a monster. He’s still himself but struggling as his fly side overtakes him. Here Hedison proves his skill as actor. Robbed of his affable grin and leading-man looks, he’s forced to rely on body language to convey his inner turmoil and he convinces. Granted, unlike how it bridged the teleportation gap, the script has no ready analogy for how a human brain would work inside a fly head or how a fly arm could graft itself onto a human body and still work. But these prove minor blemishes, as we’re enraptured by Hedison’s performance and the hope that if Owens finds the fly that went through the teleporter with him, the process might be reversed.

Of course, it’s not to be, which leads us back to the film’s opening. No one believes Owens and she’s placed under arrest for murder. As the police lead her out, Price and the chief inspector—in a now classic scene—find the fly, with Hedison’s head and arm, caught in a spider’s web wailing “Help me!” in a high-pitched squeal as the monstrous spider bears down upon it.

Great stuff. And it’s easy to see why director David Cronenberg remade it in 1986. He kept the human drama, but avoided the near-laughable visage of a half-human, half-fly by extending the backwards type metaphor, and have the teleportation mutate his scientist’s DNA leading to a gradual—and grotesque—devolution.

Indeed, this proves a rare case where the original film benefits from its remake, as the 1950s effects prove less distracting because we know how grotesque a story it could be, and instead focus on the ethical drama of assisted suicide and the perils of technological progress.

The Fly also proves something of a milestone for Vincent Price, despite his minor role. In 1958, his only two outright horrors (House of Wax and The Mad Magician) had come five years prior. His last two feature appearances had been in 1957’s The Story of Mankind and 1956’s The Ten Commandments. But The Fly’s success, followed by his turns in next year’s House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, The Bat, and The Fly’s sequel, Return of the Fly, began a run of horror films that cemented him as a genre icon.

This viewing proved a pleasant surprise. My faulty memory lent it the freshness of a first-time watch. The heightened production values and smart script set it above typical 1950s creature-features. Though it’s not perfect—aside from the aforementioned effects, one wonders why they kept the source story’s French-Quebec setting despite the cast’s lack of accents—but for classic horror movie fans, The Fly deserves to be talked about alongside Frankenstein and The Invisible Man.